Paul J. Crutzen Biography

Paul J. Crutzen (born 1933) has led fellow scientists in the attempt
to map out the chemicals that affect the ozone layer. He has been
instrumental in learning how the ozone layer is formed and destroyed,
and in uncovering the role industries play in its destruction. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for discovering certain
chemical compounds that reduce the ozone layer, and that certain
bacteria in the soil can determine its thickness.

Crutzen was born on December 3, 1933, in Holland to Anna Gurk and Jozef
Crutzen. He had one sister. Crutzen was raised in a rather cosmopolitan
atmosphere filled with international ideas and attitudes. He grew up in a
poor family in Nazi-occupied Holland. During his elementary school days
World War II was going on, and he and his classmates had to move to a new
building after their school was taken over by Nazi troops. Crutzen
especially remembered the last winter of the war in 1944–45. He
wrote in his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, "During the
cold 'hongerwinter' (winter of famine) of 1944–45,
there was a severe lack of food and heating fuels. Also water for
drinking, cooking and washing was available only in limited quantities for
a few hours per day, causing poor hygienic conditions. Many died of hunger
and disease, including several of my schoolmates."

Intention to Build Houses

Crutzen was one of the few children who was able to graduate from
elementary school on time; the rest were kept back a year. At the time not
all children were allowed to attend high school, but Crutzen was selected
to do just that after he did very well on the entrance exam. He went to
the Hogere Burgerschool, where he focused on natural sciences and learned
to speak French, English, and German. He enjoyed playing soccer and
bicycling and loved distance ice skating. He was also interested in chess,
and at school he was interested in physics and math, not really liking
chemistry at all. After graduation he went on to a two-year college, the
Middelbare Technische School, because he could not afford to go to a
university. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering in 1954. With
this degree under his belt he set out to design bridges and houses.

Soon after graduation, while he was vacationing in Switzerland, Crutzen
met Tertu Soininen. The couple married two years later and moved to Gavle,
Sweden, in 1958, where Crutzen had obtained a job at a building
construction

bureau. The Crutzens had a daughter, Ilona, that December. Another girl,
Sylvia, was born in March of 1964.

Switched to Atmospheric Chemistry

What Crutzen really wanted professionally, however, was to work for an
academic department, not a building bureau, so when the opportunity
presented itself he applied for a job as a computer programmer at the
Institute of Meteorology at the University of Stockholm. He had no
experience in computers, but at the time there were few who did, and he
was accepted from a large candidate pool to take on the position. The
family moved to Stockholm. He was originally interested in mathematics,
but soon lost his passion for it in favor of atmospheric chemistry. While
working, Crutzen also earned a doctorate in meteorology at the university.

In 1965 Crutzen went to help a U.S. scientist develop a model of the
stratosphere. It was this project that awakened Crutzen's interest
in the chemical makeup of the ozone layer. He started reading everything
he could on the subject, his interest growing with each new piece of
information. It also gave him an idea of the state of research on the
ozone layer at that time. He went back to Sweden with a new purpose for
his degree research. Crutzen stated in his autobiography on the Nobel
Prize website, "Instead of the initially proposed research project,
I preferred research on stratospheric chemistry, which was generously
accepted."

Researched Ozone Layer

At the time the current research areas at the University of Stockholm were
dynamics, the physics of clouds, the carbon cycle, studies of the chemical
composition of rainwater, and especially acid rain, which was one of the
hottest research topics at that time. However, Crutzen maintained an
interest in studying the ozone layer.

Ozone itself is a bluish gas that has a strong scent and is irritating to
living organisms. It has three oxygen atoms and forms naturally in the
atmosphere through a process called photochemical reaction, having to do
with the chemical reaction of light. The ozone layer is located ten miles
above the surface of the Earth and is approximately 20 to 30 miles thick.
Its purpose is to absorb the ultraviolet radiation that the sun emits.
Atmospheric warming occurs when that layer begins to deplete.

In 1970 Crutzen discovered that certain bacteria in the soil gave off a
nitrous oxide gas which rose all the way to the stratosphere, where it was
changed by a photochemical process into two chemicals, nitric oxide and
nitrogen dioxide. He learned that these two gases were part of what caused
the ozone to shrink in size. This one realization led scientists across
the globe to examine chemicals found on earth to see how they affected the
ozone layer's size.

Studied Effects of Smoke and Nuclear War

Crutzen went on from this research to become in 1977 the director of the
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. From
there he worked on how burning trees and brush in Brazil effected the
atmosphere. In Brazil farmers would clear the forests every year by
burning them down. It was thought that this burning was releasing carbon
monoxide and other carbon compounds into the air that were causing the
greenhouse effect, the warming of the atmosphere. When Crutzen collected
samples and did his research, however, he found out that the exact
opposite was happening. The yearly smoke was actually decreasing the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This discovery intrigued
Crutzen, and he went on to study the effects of other kinds of smoke on
the atmosphere, especially the smoke that would come from a global
disaster such as a nuclear war.

Once he made his interest in researching such a topic known, several
sponsors came forward. The journal
Ambio
paid Crutzen and his University of Colorado colleague John Birks to study
how a nuclear war would effect the planet. The pair put together a model
of a worldwide nuclear war. According to the scientists nuclear war would
have a fallout of black carbon soot that would result from fires raging
across the planet. This soot would absorb up to 99 percent of the sunlight
that the Earth needs to survive. This would cause the entire planet to be
thrown into a state of perpetual winter so vast that it would destroy
every living thing. For proposing this theory Crutzen was named
"Scientist of the Year" by
Discover
magazine in 1984 and was awarded the esteemed Tyler Award in 1988.

When these theories and others about the destructive nature of certain
chemicals on the ozone layer came to the attention of the general public
and to governments around the world, an international treaty was drawn up
in 1987. Called the Montreal Protocol, it was negotiated by the United
Nations and was eventually signed by 70 countries. The protocol stated
that these countries would phase out, no matter how slowly, the production
of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals by the year
2000. The United States managed to stop producing things with the harmful
chemicals in them by the year 1995, although it still remained the leading
producer of carbon emissions in the world. The hole in the ozone layer
over the South Pole was still increasing in 2000, but it was thought that
it was because of existing products with the harmful chemicals in them
that would take a while to deplete. A full reversal of the problem was not
expected to take place for hundreds of years.

Crutzen stayed at the NCAR until 1980. At the same time he taught classes
at Colorado State University in the department of Atmospheric Sciences. He
became director of the Atmospheric Chemistry Department at
Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in 1980 and remained
as such until 2000. From 1992 on he taught part-time at Scripps
Institution of Oceanography at the University of California and also at
Utrecht University's Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences
in the Netherlands.

Suggested Interim Solution to Ozone Problems

In 2006 Crutzen was acknowledged to have come up with a solution for
helping to stave off the effects of global warming. He suggested that the
chemical composition of the Earth's upper atmosphere be altered.
Attempts to stave off man-made alterations to the atmosphere had been so
meager that according to Crutzen a more drastic approach was necessary.
His suggestion was to release some sulphur into the upper atmosphere. The
sulphur should reflect sunlight and the heat from it back into space. It
was a very controversial solution, but has been receiving some serious
consideration because of Crutzen's known track record of excellence
in the past. The sulphur could either be scattered by balloons designed
for high altitude flight or could be shot into the air by heavy artillery
shells. According to the London
Independent
, "Such 'geo-engineering' of the climate has been
suggested before, but Professor Crutzen goes much further by drawing up a
detailed model of how it can be done, the timescales involved, and the
costs."

The idea has raised objections around the globe, most often because such
an operation, scientists fear, would be seen as a quick fix and then
governments would cease to search for more permanent solutions to the
problem. Crutzen has argued that this would be a stopgap measure and that
pressures on governments to improve their emissions would remain. In his
opinion this would be a way to temporarily reduce global warming issues
while countries worked more fervently to change their practices.

His plan was modeled in part on the eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano
in 1991. Thousands of tons of sulphur were thrown into the air when the
volcano erupted causing temperatures around the globe to decrease. Putting
the sulphur into the stratosphere rather than lower down, as in the case
of the volcano, would create a year or two of lower temperatures rather
than just a few weeks. The project would cost about $25 to $50 billion,
but it is Crutzen's belief that that cost is nothing to what global
warming is doing to all life on Earth. Because of his contributions to
modern science, Crutzen was elected in 2006 to become a foreign member of
the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science
and the world's oldest scientific academy in uninterrupted
existence. As of 2007 he continued his studies into improving the
atmosphere.